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Sunday, March 24, 2013

The Marriage License, What Is It Good For?

Looks like Colorado removed a bit of adultery legislation from the books. Does it now mean that marriage licenses are an official statement that two people are committed to each other, except when they are fooling around with others? No, not at all. It is not even about that context of adultery, it is about adultery by people not married to each other:

The legislation that Gov. John Hickenlooper signed Friday removes what Democratic bill sponsors say is an outdated 19-century statute. The bill also would repeal the rarely-used law of contributing to “sexual immorality” by providing a place, such as a hotel room, for unmarried people to have sex.

A few learned souls have taken to ‘school’ me on why it is so gosh-darn important to “allow” 4% of the US population to tell various governments that they are forever monogamously coupled, rather than removing the "requirement" from the remaining population. "Forever" being defined as: Until they hire a lawyer or two to seek permission from various governments to decouple and invite the bureaucracy in to redistribute their property.

An overt reason (seems to be a prevailing one) given by a libertarian for licensing was forwarded by a Richard fellow, who said on this blog, March 21, 2013 at 2:33 PM:

Regardless of benefits, penalties, or whatever, individuals in society generally regard the state marriage license as the official statement that two people are committed to each other. I do not agree with this, but am simply stating the fact.

Sorry pal, no dice. This is no libertarian position at all. It is a statist and, quite frankly, collectivist position. Seeking permission from the government that two people are committed to each other is simply ridiculous. It is like seeking recognition from the state to be in a motorcycle club. It is not a “regardless of benefits” issue either, it is all about the “benefits” for having an official marriage certificate.

Members in our society have been conditioned to believe that marriage comes from government, just like they think that is where wealth comes from too. Marriage did not begin with government and a quick Googling will reveal that. Even WikiPedia has plenty of commentary linked to good sources on the topic.

The banns of marriage, commonly known simply as the "banns" or "bans" (from a Middle English word meaning "proclamation," rooted in Frankish and from there to Old French[1]) are the public announcement in a Christian parish church of an impending marriage between two specified persons. It is commonly associated with the Church of England and with other denominations whose traditions are similar; the Roman Catholic Church abolished the requirement in 1983.

“The original Catholic Canon law on the subject, intended to prevent clandestine marriages, was decreed in Canon 51 of the Lateran IV Council in 1215; until then, the public announce in church of marriages to be contracted was only done in some areas. [2]”

Things went on this way until governments got into the game with marriage licenses, over four hundred years later:

“Marriage licenses have been required since 1639 in Massachusetts, with their use gradually expanding to other jurisdictions.[2] These prohibitions have changed throughout history. In the 1920s, they were used by 38 states to prohibit whites from marrying blacks, mulattos, Japanese, Chinese, Indians, Mongolians, Malays or Filipinos without a state approved license. At least 32 nations have established significant prohibitions on same-sex marriage.[3]”

Oddly, many nations have other restrictions not mentioned in that article can be found elsewhere, like the US prohibition on polygamy, handed down by the federal government in the following acts:

Edmunds-Tucker was not repealed until 1978, over a century after church property was seized by federal marshals, the people affected were dead, and to this day none of these marriage licensing do-gooders are advocating that this lifestyle become recognized by any government. Polygamy is still illegal in every State and is prosecuted. What adult homosexual couples are going to jail for cohabitating? What homosexual communes are being raided and locked up? If you find one, let me know. Utah and Texas are still locking up polygamists, even if they have to dream up a way to make them polygamists with legal trickery like constructive marriage.

Note that I do not practice or advocate polygamy, yet I do not want to jail those who do. I am actually advocating equality here, and the only way to make it all legal is to end the licenses.

Even worse, States across the Republic license solemnizers to perform marriages. If you are not on those rolls, might not be a big deal if you perform a marriage not recognized by the State. It simply stays in the ‘bizarre’ world of unrecognized marriage. However, if people come to you with a marriage license and you “marry” them, there could be all sorts of trouble in store for you for marrying people without a license.

The marriage license libertarians seem perfectly content with unlicensed parsons going to the slammer, but raise Holy Hell if someone with a viable marijuana seed is locked up. I find both intolerable.

They also seem in a tizzy that homosexual couples can only get married-by-license in a few States right now, yet they can live together monogamously, or in groups, in every State without any more legal risk to property or liberty than heterosexuals. Unfortunately for all those "shacking up" together, and the statist faction of the libertarian movement, each individual is only entitled to entitlements attached to their name and their means, not that of anybody else. Oh the humanity!

Another issue is if a licensed solemnizer marries people who do not have the proper paperwork. He can be fined or jailed for that infraction. Now the ‘libertarian’ position is to increase this? Not this libertarian.

Like my colleague Chuck, I would prefer the government to be extracted from all licenses, including marriage licenses. The Overton Window (link added by me), however, is not yet open enough to achieve this, so the libertarian maxim to follow is equal treatment under law.

If equal treatment under the law were the objective, then all combinations of marriage would be included. The spectrum of matrimony is much wider than individual pairs of people. There is no advocacy in their article, nor in Richard’s responses for equal treatment of all people under the law. No, this is simply pandering to a vocal minority who want to expand government handouts, those handed out through marriage certificates.

Also, in every other subject, libertarians are quick to point out the history of why things are unjust, like in the area of keeping and bearing arms, or to ingest into your one body whatever you like. Is any history ever brought up in the latest round of marriage license expansion? Sure, they skip the beginning and jump to the part where Black people were prohibited from licensed marriage to Whites. They leave out Asians, and they conveniently skip how licensing came about to begin with, then skip to the lie of how homosexuals are the only ones taking it in the shorts over marriage licensing.

They also leave out some of the inconvenient truths of licensed marriage. The easy to find “presumption of paternity” issue comes to mind without even trying:

Presumption of paternity in common law is the legal determination that a man is "presumed to be" a child's biological father without additional supportive evidence, usually as a result of marriage.

What this also means in much of America, is that the closest male named on the paperwork of a mother is the “father,” especially in the Progressive enclave of California:

In this case, a married woman had an affair and became pregnant. The biological father went to court for his parental rights and was refused because the presumption of paternity was given to Mary L’s legal husband.

And it is not like this issue is not in the high-profile celebrity and sports news either, with Michael Jordan in a Georgia paternity suit, claiming in his “defense” that someone else was married to the mother when the child, allegedly produced by Jordan, was born.

This is what the statist, marriage license pushing ‘libertarians’ want to continue?

Near the end, Richard writes:

It is my choice today to lobby for those special privileges to be repealed. I argue this on moral, legal, and ideological grounds. Some day in the future, I believe libertarians will have a better chance of removing the state from consensual contractual agreements if every adult couple being harmed by state marriage regulation can stand against it together. (I will add I believe that day is far, far in the future.)

Again, they are not arguing for everybody who wants to be married, since there is no call to recognize the Muslim four wife limit, or anything other than same sex monogamous marriage. But it makes perfect sense if your solution to ending welfare is to hand it out to even more people, which is neither moral nor (libertarian) ideological.

Some day in the future we might have a secure border too, like Rand Paul advocates. But if your first step is opening it wider, it draws some skepticism to your claim to want to secure it. Similarly, if you want to end special privileges, arguing to expand them reveals you as a fraud at worst and quite confused at best.

It could certainly be legal, just pass a law for more government handouts. We already have 95%+ of the country eligible for marriage licenses, yet millions choose not to get them and forgo the government subsidies associated with legal marriage, yet these vocal libertarians ignore them and concentrate on expanding the handouts.

And please, for the love of English, please stop calling licenses and handouts "rights."